644
HAROLD ROSENBERG
ward impulse, because I am so impressed by all that has happened.
~
shall simply record the incidents, doing my utmost to exclude
everything extraneous, especially all literary graces. The profession–
al writer writes for thirty years, and is quite unable to say at the
end why he has been writing ... I am not a professional writer
and
don't want to be, and to drag forth into the literary marketplace
the utmost secrets of my soul and an artistic description of my feel–
ings I should regard as indecent and contemptible. I foresee, how–
ever, with vexation, that it will be impossible to avoid describing
feelings altogether and making reflections (even, perhaps, cheap
ones), so corrupting is every sort of literary pursuit ... [After more
of this he goes back to the "facts," pretending to state them as bald–
lyas possible.] I am beginning-or rather, I should like to begin–
these notes from the 19th of September of last year, that is from
the very first day I met-But to explain so prematurely, who it was
I met before anything else is known would be cheap;
in
fact, I
believe my tone is cheap. I vowed I would eschew all literary graces,
and here at the first sentence I am being seduced by them. It seems
as if writing sensibly can't be done simply by wanting
to.
Apparently, the recital of facts is inadequate, if not
impos–
sible, and art will get you if you do watch out. Dostoevsky
is
protesting that art
has
got him, but like all anti-artists he
is
protesting with his tongue
in
his cheek; his attack on "literary
graces" has become a defense of them, because he really wants
most of all to create a work of art, though he has a bad con–
science about it. Dada with its famous program of finishing
art
off split on this same issue that some (most) of its members were
dealing from under the table by taking their work as constituting
a new art movement.
Artists' suspiciousness concerning art has led not to the
abando~ent
of art but to radical experiments with form. It
has
p~oduced
anti-formal art, a contradiction in terms, but a fruitful
contradiction. It has also given us "pure" art, that
is,
an
art
that
asserts the exclusively formal character of art. Recently, informal
art has come into being to such an extent that in France
art
in-
